![]() ![]() If you love your Mac apps, it’s never been a better time to be locked into the Apple ecosystem. It is a far cry from the situation just a few years ago, when the Mac felt neglected and unloved, in the shadow of its much more popular iPhone cousin. ![]() In speaking with developers, it seems clear that Apple has taken pains to ensure developers have been able to translate the performance gains of the new M1 Macs into apps that come loaded with more power and more features. If you get an M1-powered Mac, not only will you have a much more powerful machine than Apple could previously offer, but the apps you run on it could come with features that simply were not feasible before. What sort of app performance improvements are we talking about here? Hewson provided an enlightening example: In some cases, Serif apps perform 10 times faster on an M1 MacBook than on a souped-up 16-inch MacBook Pro, one of Apple’s most powerful consumer machines.īoth Thomson and Bastys explained that the hardware advancements of the M1 will allow apps to do things that just were not possible on older Macs, with more features and more power at their disposal. “The architecture there is completely different and involves moving data between the GPU, CPU, and RAM.” “This was simply not possible on Intel Macs,” Bastys told me. Simonas Bastys, lead developer at photo-editing app Pixelmator told me that the M1 chip’s Unified Memory Architecture, which allows internal components to share memory and thus reduce the costs of passing data between them, results in “big performance improvements.” More power, more featuresĪll the developers I spoke to were adamant that the M1 chips – and whatever Apple follows them up with – will bring benefits to Mac fans, particularly in the form of even more powerful Mac apps. Instead, the primary benefits lie in the newfound power these apps will put at your fingertips. Those features take time to build into apps. As several pointed out, iOS apps are made for touch surfaces and will need Mac-specific features (like mouse and multi-window support) to make them enjoyable experiences on Apple’s computers. He explained that Serif has always avoided relying on Intel-specific components in its apps and has focused on developing for the iPad – which also uses Apple-designed processors – meaning it was able to develop for the M1 without a hitch.Ĭonsidering the ease of developing for Apple’s new chips, should you expect your favorite apps to come out sooner? And given that M1 Macs will be able to natively run iOS apps, will that mean less development time? That is unlikely, the developers said. Both Case and Thomson said the process was almost identical.Īsh Hewson is the managing director at Serif and responsible for apps that have won numerous Apple Design awards. Key to this simplicity was the similarity between developing for Intel and Apple Silicon processors. IOS apps are made for touch surfaces and will still need Mac-specific features. iOS apps are made for touch surfaces and will still need Mac-specific features. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |